A: In my view, the complete elimination of conditioning is neither possible nor desirable for human beings, and it’s a misunderstanding of the goal of spiritual work to think we need to achieve some kind of blank or “unconditioned” state. The very capacity to experience pleasure, pain, love, sorrow, beauty, or anything else, is thoroughly conditioned by our biology, neurology, evolutionary history, culture, personal histories, and other types of conditioning. Every thought, sensation, perception and feeling we are capable of depends on the particular conditioning of being the kinds of organisms we are.

The pain we feel when we stub our toe, the pleasure of eating a delicious meal, the love and care we feel for our family and friends, the sense of awe and wonder evoked by a beautiful sunset – all of these core human experiences arise because we have been conditioned by millions of years of evolution to feel them. We have a nervous system that is wired to produce the sensations of pain under certain circumstances, and the sensations of pleasure under others. We have mirror neurons and hormonal systems that attune us to the emotional states of others and allow us to form strong social bonds. We have pattern-seeking brains that find meaning and significance in the arrangements of light and color that we call sunsets. Without our conditioned human minds and bodies metabolizing reality in these particular ways, we would not experience life as we know it.

So when we investigate the nature of the self and of reality through meditative practices and inquiry, the point is not to eradicate our humanness. We are not trying to delete our personalities, our histories, our cultural and social embeddedness. The goal is not to transcend all traces of Philip or Nancy or Radhika and become some kind of “pure consciousness” devoid of all particularity. That’s a fantasy born from a denial of our embodied, conditioned nature.

What we discover is that we don’t need to get rid of our conditioning in order to be free. When the illusion of being a separate, unchanging entity is seen through, it becomes clear that every aspect of our conditioned existence – our genes, our habits, our likes and dislikes, our relationships, our struggles and our successes – all of it is an intrinsic part of the seamless totality.

So in my view, even for someone who has seen through the core illusion of separation and duality, vestiges of conditioning will remain – and that’s totally workable. An “awakened” person still has a particular personality structure. They still have certain predispositions and habits based on their genetics, their family of origin, the culture they grew up in. If they were temperamentally impatient or anxious before awakening, those tendencies don’t necessarily disappear completely. What does change is the relationship to those patterns. They are no longer taken to be “my” patterns, or essential to “my” identity.

It is certainly the case that spiritual insight and practice can loosen the grip of conditioning that creates unnecessary suffering, both for oneself and others. Patterns of obsessive thinking, destructive behavior, or emotional reactivity can relax and untangle in the light of a more spacious, less defended sense of what we are. Conditioning that arose in response to trauma or unmet needs in childhood may not have as much charge when we’re no longer invested in being a fragile, separate self. So in a very real sense, awakening is a process of deconditioning.

But it’s a deconditioning from the conditioned belief in the separate self, not a deconditioning from our human conditioning altogether. We’re deconditioning from the habit of taking our passing experiences to be who we essentially are. We’re deconditioning from the sense that “my” conditioning is personal – that “I” need to protect and defend it, or get rid of it in order to be free. We are liberated into our tender, messy, gorgeous conditioning, not from it. We are free to be exactly as we are, in all our perfection.